James Casebere was raised in Detroit, studied with Siah Armajani at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and John Baldessari as a graduate student at Cal Arts. For 50 years, he has built and photographed architecturally based models and made sculptural installations exploring the intersection of sculpture, photography, architecture, and film. His work is in the collections of and has been shown at major museums, including MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Tate, the LA County Museum of Art, and many others. He has had solo shows at the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, MoMA, Oxford, the Cleveland MoCA, the Indianapolis MFA, and others. He had a major retrospective in 2016 at the HdK in Munich and was included in The Pictures Generation, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009.
Casebere has received three NEA, three NYFA, and one Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. In 2019, he was awarded the Rome Prize and is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. His 2024 solo shows include those at Sean Kelly in New York City and T-Space in Rhinebeck. In 2026, he received the Pollack-Krasner Award and will be a resident at Casa Wabi in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. His upcoming solo shows include those at Sean Kelly in LA and the Williamsburg Biannual in Brooklyn.
At MacDowell, Casebere worked on twelve 24x30 inch paintings and five drawings, all of which were studies for larger paintings. Most of these were of Baobab trees, done from photos taken in Senegal. Several were paintings of architecture, including the Goethe Institute in Dakar and the branching house by Steven Holl.
